Meister Eckhart: Session 4

James Finley (0:00)

How do you tell the story of your inner journey? Join James Finley for the Healing Stories Online Retreat, Saturday, August 26th, from 9 to 5 Pacific. Inspired by his memoir, The Healing Path, Jim offers guided reflections to help you become more conscious of the thread of your own sacred journey. The event will be recorded and all registered will have access to the replay.

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SPEAKER_2 (0:41)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation.

James Finley (0:45)

To learn more, visit cac.org. Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time together, Turning for Guidance to the Christian Mystic, Meister Eckhart.

In this fourth session, it will be the last session I'll be doing alone on Eckhart, Kirsten Oates will be dialoguing with me about it, and you'll have a chance also to ask questions. But in this last one, I want to acknowledge that there's really too much here for one session. But we only have one session. So I'd rather complete my lesson plan and know that I said it all. Knowing that on your own, if you're so inclined, you can go back and listen to this repeatedly or take it to prayer or look at the commentaries that are provided if you're so inclined to pursue this. But at least this will round out the picture of Meister Eckhart's teachings. And I'd like to begin by going back to the beginning and kind of summarizing this vision that he has, this spiritual vision, and how the light shining out from this vision that illumines the path along which he guides us to this deep reunion with God. So we'll begin at the beginning.

We begin with Eckhart's bearing witness that the generosity of the infinite is infinite.

That from all of eternity, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself and pouring itself out, whole and complete, in and as the gift and the miracle of the intimate immediacy of our very presence, the presence of others and the presence of all things in our eternal nothingness without God.

Moving in closer still, Eckhart would say, this is true of all of creation. This is true of God's, the let it be. This is true of the world and plants and trees and animals, the darkness of the night, the change of the seasons. But it's especially true of us in that God has given us as persons created by God and the image and likeness of God that the abyss-like depths of God has been by the generosity of God given to us as the abyss-like depths of ourself, this abyss-like depth which he calls the ground. So that in our created human nature, in our created humanity, there is deep within us an uncreated union that is at once the abyss-like depth of ourself and the abyss-like depth of God given to us as the abyss-like depth of ourself.

Next. God then has given us in our human nature, which he calls the powers of the soul, we might say our faculties, our human experience. God has given us the gift of the intellect, the understanding self and all that we seek to understand, our memory, our remembering self and all that we seek to remember, our desiring self, our love and all that we seek to love in our powers. This is how we live our life. And our senses and our emotions, all of our human nature and our powers.

The difficulty is, is that the powers have been exiled from the ground. So that when we seek to understand, we seek to understand in a way that's exiled from the ground. And when we try to remember, we seek to remember in a way that's exiled from the ground and so on.

And in this exiled state, which is one way of understanding the fallen state or the broken state of humanity, that we're experientially exiled from this upwelling or this infinite generosity of every breath and heartbeat that alone is ultimately real and we don't see it.

And in the powers, then we act out of the powers and not out of the ground. And therefore we tend to think we're nothing but our powers. That is, we're nothing but the self things happen to. I'm nothing but when I'm able to understand or not understand, to remember or not to remember, to love or not love. And because I think this is all that I am, which is ultimately an illusion, because I'm nothing without God, I cling to my powers. And this clinging intensifies the estrangement from the ground, which causes distress, the fear of death, possessiveness of heart, the human experience.